Since 1986 Icahn School of Medicine has co-sponsored an annual series of day-long conferences, Issues in Medical Ethics. These conferences attract a broad audience of 150-200 participants including physicians, medical students, nurses and other health care providers, scientists, lawyers, academics, and graduate students. Speakers have come from medicine, philosophy, government, and law.
Each year’s conference focuses on a timely issue. Topics have included medical professionalism, organ transplantation, the Americans with Disabilities Act, money and access to health care. The proceedings of many of these conferences have appeared in special issues of The Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine. In February 2014, the conference topic was “Data Science and Digital Medicine.”
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Co-Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Workshop on Precision Medicine: Ethics Politics, and Culture
Maël Lemoine (University of Tours): Medicine without Diseases
5:30 pm on Monday, May 9th, Philosophy Hall 716, Columbia University
Philosophers have discussed the definition of the general concept of disease, but have paid less attention to the general concept of a “disease entity”. Whereas the former aims to distinguish healthy from pathological states, the latter aims at a distinction between pathological states. But what would happen to the concept of disease if the concept of disease entities were abandoned? An intuition may be that the demarcation between “health” and “disease” would go unchanged. Yet this would lead to a conflation of both functions, namely, of the health/disease demarcation and the Disease A/Disease Z demarcation. This result is a potential consequence of so-called “precision medicine,” in particular, of theranostic approaches that aim to match disease signatures with treatment signatures while potentially bypassing the step of categorical diagnosis. In this talk I present what I call the three models of disease – the disease entity, disease mechanisms and disease signatures – and demonstrate how health and disease should be distinguished for a naturalist philosopher of medicine applying a disease signature model instead of a disease entity one.
Sue Weinberg Lecture
Public Health Skepticism and Respect for Women’s Voices
Anne Barnhill (Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania)
Jessica Martucci (Fellow in Advanced Biomedical Ethics, University of Pennsylvania)
OCTOBER 28, 2016, 4:30-6:30pm
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Room TBA